"Language installs the dimension of truth (inconceivable outside of discourse or what is structured as discourse) even as it excludes all guarantee of this truth. In relation to this absence of guarantee, a primary affirmation is engendered that is also the primary truth.""So runs the signifier's answer [to the subject], above and beyond all significations: 'You think you act when I stir you at the mercy of the bonds through which I knot your desires. Thus do they grow and multiply in objects bringing you back to the fragmentation of you shattered childhood."
"You will grasp why the relationship of the subject to the signifier is the reference that we would place in the foreground of a general rectification of analytic theory, because it is as primary and constituting in the setting up of analytical experience, as it is primary and constituting in the radical function of the unconscious." It has "priority in relation to the signified." And "the signifier alone guarantees the theoretical coherence of the entirety [of the subject] as an entirety."
(Jacques Lacan, Ecrits)
